I work on a team that has members distributed across two locations. We use the policy described above, but there is a flip side to this problem. Most of our developers are one location with a 1/6 minority in another. The larger group of developers loses the advantages of face-to-face communication for meetings in favor of equal footing for everyone. Is that a net improvement on quality of communication? I don't know, but I'd rather meet with my colleagues in adjacent cubes face-to-face rather than over the phone the way we do now.
As a developer "on the other side" I can tell you that you would be surprised how hard it is to follow along at these meetings.
For example: Most of the meetings I attend are largely ad-hoc with printed material being handed out at the time of the meeting - usually not available on the company intranet (or emailed) until after the meeting. It makes it immensely difficult to follow along and contribute in a meaningful manner.
Honestly, there are many benefits to having everyone "remote" for a group meeting. It focuses the meeting. After the meeting you still have the luxury of walking over to your co-workers's desk and chatting in detail about the problem.
I've noticed that for my team, some of the bigger meetings seem to attract the problems described in the article, whereas our scrum meetings are more on-topic and brief. It would seem that for our case the 'everyone calls in' solution would work better in the bigger meetings, while we keep the face-to-face interaction in the scrums.
The best part of that page was the ad for the Google Nexus One at the bottom that Google chose to show me. But I don't care, because Google does a pretty good job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34255319